Case Number 13203: Small Claims Court

RFK Must Die

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All Rise...

Judge Jim Thomas has his doubts about a CIA conspiracy-which is just what the CIA wants you to believe.

The Charge

Did the CIA Kill Bobby Kennedy?

The Case

Lost in the shadow of the questions surrounding the assassination of John F.
Kennedy are the equally perplexing questions surrounding the assassination of
his younger brother Bobby. Many of the theories around RFK's death parallel
those of JFK-Mafia payback for broken promises, Castro, the industrial-military
complex, Teamsters…Dismissing the official report that Sirhan Sirhan acted
alone, writer-director Shane O'Sullivan conducted his own investigation,
tracking down as many surviving witnesses as possible, poring over photographs
and video, talking with experts, etc. O'Sullivan posits a CIA conspiracy to kill
RFK, a conspiracy built around the brainwashing of Sirhan. The motive is
simple-power. The CIA answered to no one at the time, and they feared that a RFK
presidency would sharply reduce their autonomy. O'Sullivan manages to raise some
legitimate questions, particularly concerning the initial investigation, but
never quite creates a compelling case.

From a structural perspective, O'Sullivan does an excellent job presenting
his case. He takes time to establish RFK's political history, so that by the
time O'Sullivan gets to the assassination, even viewers unfamiliar with RFK can
appreciate the man's charisma, his idealism, and the way in which he captured
the public's imagination. The film then examines the questions surrounding the
shooting, segueing into the argument concerning the possibility of CIA
involvement.

The conspiracy theory itself, though, isn't quite as solidly structured. The
first question is perhaps the most important. With five minutes left in
Kennedy's victory speech, campaign manager Eddie Dutton changed RFK's route from
the stage; instead of going to another ballroom, he went back through the
kitchen area. It's clearly an important question, possibly the most important
question, as it was the last-minute change brought RFK into the kill zone. The
explanation was that Dutton wanted to get RFK to a press conference to try and
get as much coverage of the victory as possible. It's a good, sensible
explanation, and the documentary does nothing to suggest another option, or to
even suggest that Dutton was involved in the conspiracy.

Beyond that, the first hurdle is establishing the necessity of a second
gunman; and here we run into the first obstacle-the malleable nature of memory.
One of the arguments for a second shooter is that the autopsy report states that
the fatal bullet was fired into Kennedy's skull at an upwards angle from point
blank range just behind his right ear. Sirhan, however, was to the side of
Kennedy, and witnesses put him at anywhere from two to six feet away from
Kennedy. But in an interview for this documentary, Vincent Di Pierro, a waiter
standing next to Sirhan when he started shooting, stated that Sirhan had
crouched down, as though he were having stomach cramps, then turned, extended
the gun, and lunged forward towards Kennedy, with the gun being no more than six
inches or so from Kennedy. That would put the gun in roughly the correct
position to have delivered the fatal bullet. O'Sullivan offers a number of
reasons that Di Pierro's recollections might be inaccurate, but everything that
is said about Di Pierro's memory also holds true for all of the other witnesses
as well. The issue remains cloudy, but Di Pierro's on camera statement is
compelling, particularly since the other witness statements are drawn from the
police record, not interviews (Not surprisingly, many of the key players had
died by the time this documentary was made). The extensive use of Di Pierro
throughout establishes that O'Sullivan finds him credible-and now O'Sullivan
tries to undermine that credibility? Curiously, O'Sullivan does not interview
Rosey Grier or Rafer Johnson, who actually grabbed and subdued Sirhan (Grier was
as a bodyguard for RFK).

O'Sullivan has better luck establishing that the investigation was
rushed-there are tapes of witnesses being badgered into recanting any statements
that suggested that Sirhan did not act alone, there is photographic evidence of
additional gunshots. Most troublesome was the report of a man and a woman seen
leaving the hotel, laughing and saying "We killed him." The rushed
nature of the investigation, more than anything else, makes a conspiracy theory
more plausible. (~20 years ago, a biography of Ted Kennedy argued that both JFK
and RFK had been mafia hits, and that the Kennedys pushed for a quick close to
the investigation, lest the mafia target other family members.)

A key problem in the documentary is the extensive use of statements by
Lawrence Teeter, Sirhan's most recent defense attorney. Teeter's overzealous
defense of Sirhan undermines his credibility; for instance, he claims that Thane
Cesar, a hotel security guard next to Kennedy should have been the number one
suspect. Excuse me? While it's true that one witness reported that Cesar had
fired a weapon, Sirhan was apprehended in the act of firing a gun at
Kennedy. From that point on, Teeter's statements-and he makes most of the
connections in the conspiracy theory-have to be taken with a grain of salt. The
biggest stretch is the claim that Sirhan was brainwashed. The psychiatrist
defending the brainwashing theory provides video of a hypnotized subject
saying something contrary to his beliefs, but that proves nothing. Speech
is a far cry from murder. More plausible explanations abound, such as dementia
or paranoid-schizophrenia. The documentary features a first-ever interview with
Sirhan's brother Munir, who paints a picture of Sirhan as a fairly ordinary guy
until he suffered a head injury while training to become a jockey. The bottom
line is that it is too easy to see Sirhan as cut from the same cloth as Mark
David Chapman or John Hinckley, and not as a pawn for the CIA or anyone else.
The film goes to great lengths to make the case for CIA involvement, but without
even marginally persuasive evidence concerning brainwashing or Sirhan's contact
with the CIA, the result is little more than supposition.

Some years ago I got into a heated argument with a colleague over the merits
of Oliver Stone's JFK. Don claimed that the
events happened exactly as Stone had depicted them; to me, though, Stone's
version of events seemed a little bit too complicated for its own good. On the
other hand, though, the movie did do a good job of pointing out the flaws in the
Warren Commission's report. I feel pretty much the same way about RFK Must
Die. The suggested conspiracy is much too convoluted, but the legitimacy of
the official report remains severely compromised. Barring some truly
earthshaking revelation, I seriously doubt that we'll ever learn the truth
behind either crime; however, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't stop
looking.